Though people with higher incomes said they'd like to save more,
"up and down the income spectrum, people said a rainy day fund
should be between 9 percent and 14 percent of their annual
income," reports NPR. In other words, these people believed that
a month's worth of income would be enough to get them through a
financial crisis like a job loss or illness.

Given that the average American family's net worth has declined 40 percent from 2007 to 2010, it
makes sense that we're finding it harder to save. Aside from the
collapse of the housing market, we still owe more than $800
billion in credit card debt to lenders and are having a hard time paying it down, according
to Credit.com. Other families are still strapped for cash due to
soaring costs of college loan debt, which the Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau pegged even higher than the trillion-dollar mark.

Overall, the numbers are pretty depressing since most experts
recommend saving at least nine months to a year of income in an
emergency account.

"People are often out of work now for as long as nine months, and
if they don't live on savings, they live on credit. So when they
replace their job, they are behind because now they have debt to
repay," Gail Cunningham, spokeswoman for the National Foundation
for Credit Counseling told Bankrate earlier this year.

To make sure that doesn't happen to you, here are a few ways to
beef up your piggy bank per YM contributor Trent Hamm:

1. Use automatic transfers. "Set up an automatic
transfer between your checking and savings accounts, making sure
that you're not pushing your checking account balance down to
zero," said Hamm.

2. Forget about it. Once everything's set
up, "be vaguely mindful of it," he said. "Don't let your checking
account get low enough so that the automatic transfer has any
danger of causing you to overdraft."

3. Do it slowly, but surely. A little goes a
long way, said Hamm, noting that "if you're putting in $20 a
week, for example, you'll have a little over $1,000 in your
emergency fund at the end of the year." That's plenty money to
handle the unexpected trip to the dentist or car repair.